DECEMBER. 549 



seem, they have many uses in Nature's economy;* 

 the birds construct their nests of them, they protect 

 the roots of larger plants from cold, and preserve, 

 amidst their dense tufts, myriads of minute insects, 

 without which provision, doubtless, many birds would 

 perish in the winter months. Everywhere, moors, 

 woods, rocks, fields, and the banks of streams and 

 marshes abound with them, so that they in fact con- 

 stitute no mean portion of the vegetable clothing of 

 the globe. 



" It is this universality of the mosses," observe the 

 authors of Muscologia Britannica, "this disposition of 

 them to grow everywhere, even in such spots as are 

 incapable of producing any other plants, that has 

 much contributed towards making their study a 

 favourite occupation with us. Upon the summits of 

 our highest native mountains, upon the most lofty 

 alps of Switzerland, and the still more elevated ones 

 of Savoy and Piedmont, upon the morasses and 

 volcanic tracts of Iceland, have we received amuse- 

 ment and instruction, though the inexperienced eye 

 could discover nothing more than seemingly barren 



* " God and nature," says Linnaeus, in his Acad. Amcen., " have made 

 nothing in vain ; and posterity may discover as much in Mosses, as of 

 utility in other herbs." Mosses are doubtless the great ministering 

 assistants of nature in the creation of sozV, the constituents of which they 

 imbibe from the atmosphere, and accumulate in masses about their roots, 

 thus in a short time forming a nidus for larger plants even upon the 

 barest rocks. This may be easily tested by any careful observer. In 

 March, ISiV, I took from the tiled roof of an out-building at Malvern 

 Wells, a tuft of the Bryum crtpillare, a moss very common on walls and 

 rocks. This tuft, with the black soil collected at its base, weighed six 

 ounces, and en carefully extracting the mould by repeated washing, the 

 actual vegetation that remained did not amount in weight to one ounce 

 the moss having thus, on a bare surface of tile, upon which it had been 

 cast by wind or rain, not only subsisted itself, but amassed by its reten- 

 tive qualities a rich humus above five times its own weight. 



